Facebook taps Opscode for cloud automation

Seattle-based cloud infrastructure automation company Opscodeannounced this morning that social media giant Facebook has deployed its Private Chef environment for its web-tier infrastructure.

How's that for a Monday morning chest thump?

If you're unfamiliar with Opscode's open source product, it is intended to make it easy for IT professionals to deploy servers and scale applications by allowing the the management of servers, configurations and administrative access policies from one place. (There is also a hosted version; both products start at $120 per month and scale from there. Yes, pun intended.)

"There are three dimensions of scale we generally look at for infrastructure: the number of servers, the volume of different configurations across those systems, and the number of people required to maintain those configurations," Facebook production engineer Phil Dibowitz said in the release. "Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow."

Given the social network's scale, it's unsurprising to learn that it helped Opscode test the eleventh version of Chef. Opscode called Facebook's infrastructure "truly unique and a model for the future of enterprise computing." That may be either encouraging or frightening, depending on what your engineers manage today.